With the advent of digital cameras, there are increasingly many photographs that exist only in digital form. There are many ways of viewing such photographs including: using a display provided on the camera, downloading the photographs onto a computer and viewing them on the computer screen, and increasingly, viewing them on a television screen. Each approach has its own problems.
A camera display is usually too small for anything but rudimentary viewing purposes. Its advantage is that the images can be viewed almost immediately, and that the images do not need to be transferred onto another device for incidental review. Digital camera screens typically have a poor resolution for viewing digital images captured by the camera.
Images stored on a computer are easy to browse and sort, but frequently have sophisticated and complicated user interfaces (UI) for viewing. It is often inconvenient to view images on a computer screen, especially in a social context, and it usually requires some technical skill with computers to do so. Computer screens typically have a good resolution for viewing digital images.
Browsing on a television is most commonly performed using a remote-control. This is a simple and commonly understood interface, and assumes little or no technical skill. However, a remote-control presents different problems. For example, two dimensional grids are more awkward to navigate, and scrollbars are impractical. The interface presented to a television viewer must be simpler. A simple approach sometimes taken is to display images in a one-dimensional list. This occurs for example in the “menu” screens of many DVD productions, browsed via the television display. It can take a great deal of time to navigate or browse a complete set of images, and it can be difficult and awkward to quickly jump to different places on the list. Televisions typically have a poor resolution for viewing digital pictures, although the more recent high-definition televisions bring the resolution to be nearly as good as computer screens.
These problems are amplified when there are many images. It is increasingly common for people to take many digital photographs, as the cost of doing so is negligible if they are not printed. People may have sets of images in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Managing these sets of photos can be complicated, and is usually done on computers. The most common approach is to break up the images into a number of folders, and to display the images in a folder as a set of thumbnails. However, more recent image management programs (such as iPhoto™ manufactured by Apple Corp.) avoid dividing the images into folders, as it is easy to lose an image in a complicated hierarchy of folders. Despite the fact that there may be tens of thousands of images, such an interface attempts to show all the images as thumbnails in a single scrolling window. In addition, many commercial picture viewers group images into folders, meaning that some images might rarely be viewed, and could be lost in the folder hierarchy. Those picture viewers that allow the display of all images usually use a two-dimensional list with a scrollbar. However, these approaches, which work reasonably well on a computer with its sophisticated user interface, work poorly when implemented on a television and remote-control.
One tool known in the art that allows a user to find images quickly is the search facility. However, search facilities often require detailed input from a user, such as typing a search term. This is often impractical when the user has a limited UI, such as a remote-control. A simple kind of search can be performed using a sort facility. Changing the sort order of a list can be done with relatively few button presses of a remote control, and a user only has to remember one aspect of an image they are looking for. The aspect may include the date or the filename of the image, or even the colour or brightness of the image. The user can sort on that criteria to find the image.
Users browse photo collections not only to find specific images, but also for the general pleasure of browsing. At any given moment, the images being browsed will be in a particular sort order (e.g., sorted by date, title, size, etc.). However, when the user changes the sort order, there is often very little change in what the user sees. Often, images that were taken at the same time will also “look” very similar in other sort orders based upon name, colour, feature, camera metadata, and so on. The lack of useful feedback results in users not changing sort orders, except when searching for a specific image.